ajft

Who views my photos, why, how often, what brings them here?

Every day or so I check with Flickr to see what is being viewed the most, and what has been viewed the most overall.

Oddly, my most viewed image has more than ten times the views of the next most viewed, and to me is a fairly boring bland photo. Linking to it here would only drive the view count up higher, so I won't!

  New office desk, just like the old office desk
  1760 views / Nobody counts New office desk, just like the old
  office desk as a favorite / 0 comments

It hasn't been there a great deal of time more than other photos, it's only posted to one group, nobody posts comments on it and I have no idea why it gets viewed so often. Any ideas?

Next on the list

  10/365 - Dad, are you sure this is an approved baby carrier?
  116 views / 1 person counts this as a favorite / 1 comment

Now I can see why number two is popular, but not number one. Very puzzling.

Generally the most recently posted photos get a few views, I guess from my friends and contacts as they popup in feed-readers and various "what's new" lists, but oddities stand out and I'd love to know what causes them. Surges of interest seem to come and go; one day it'll be tandem bicycles, the next Milford sound, the day after that any parrots. Topical subjects in the news, both very local and world-wide, act as triggers, the PBS/RRR Community Cup and Melburn-Roobaix both kicked off an interest as their times of year came arond. Of course this posting itself will have an effect, you can't measure something without affecting whatever it is you're measuring….

Tinkering about I add tags here and there and have found that the more, and better, tags that photos have then the more likely it will to be viewed — hardly surprising, it means people can find it. They're tagged, and where appropriate I try and find machine tags to add, and nearly all have latitude and longitude information in the EXIF data and in the geo-tags and can be found on the Flickr map.

Photos of the two weeks in China seem to attract a continual low-level interest, but nobody ever leaves comments on them so I have no idea who is looking at them.

All in all its a fascinating insight into what appeals to others, from a set of photos that vary wildly in quality and interest.

From Bruce Schneir's Schneier on Security, possibly one of the best articles I've ever read on the increasing harassment of anyone who dares to wield a camera in a public place:

... The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography. ...

Thank you Bruce.

Is it my suspicious mind, or does the following Flickr Mail seem a little bit dodgy?

Hello

In a dutch magazine we would like to publish your photo of the ambulance in victoria. You have it verry small online, is it possible to send me a large size of the photo. We would like to publish it on 20cm wide. So we need it verry large. We can offer you a fee of 50,- euro for the photo.

You can contact me on my e-mail: X.XXXXX@gmail.com

We do need it on wednsday or thursday 29 may at the latest, so I hope you can answer me quickly.

Best regards, XXXXX XXXXXX

Seems to me that:

• there's no mention of which photo they're referring to (there is one that matches, but any search on http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ambulance/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/victoria/ would find it)
• there's no mention of which magazine it'll be published in
• the "we need it verry large" sounds a little simplistic, rather than "we need at least X pixels wide"
• there's only a generic gmail address to respond to
• there's a sudden urgency to make me respond quickly
• there's no mention of how they'll pay

Or do I just have a suspicious mind?

I've been importing my photos into Adobe Photoshop Album over the last few years, entering titles and tagging the images. The titles go into the images in the EXIF header, but the tags and other information is held in Adobe's proprietary database. I can extract the EXIF:ImageDescription with python or perl, and some of the other image viewers will display it... some, but not all. My latest experiments have been with Google's picasa, or more specifically, the beta version from picasaweb.google.com, which allows geocoding and has various tie-ins with GoogleEarth. Unfortunately it seems that Picasa uses the IPTC:Caption-Abstract as the source of its title, so all the information I've entered via Photoshop Album is ignored.

A few quick searches and then, Phil Harvey's came exiftool to the rescue! Read and write every single possible type of metadata, at least every possible type I'm interested in at the moment.

exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode=AUS *JPG
exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName=Australia *JPG

I'm not really sure what to do with the postcodes (zipcodes), I think I'll put them into IPTC:Sub-Location, at least until someone sends me a nasty-gram telling me the correct field to use.

PSAtools was next (the author no longer maintains it, but I found a copy archived elsewhere. Dump out the Photoshop Album catalogue into CSV and XML text files so I can play with it to my heart's content.

Good news or the bad news? Good news is that I've got my photos back from Kodak, although the prints don't seem to be the same quality as I'd expect, and the CD seems to come from a third party... Are they subcontracting out their work? Is digital photography biting them that hard? Bad news seems to be that all the time and date information that the APS camera records on each frame has been omitted from the prints and the scans. I've got a helpful "24.03.2005 — 04.12.2005" printed on the index print, and that's all.

It'll be another case of a few hours of leafing through old journals and comparing notes to find when they were taken. At least most of them seem to be grouped on a few major days; Uluru, Adelaide, and the Wilson's Prom. weekend.

One other good thing may have come of it though. The CD of images seems to have been created by QFL Photos, and has their website printed on the disk. My curiosity took me there and I found that they'll scan exposed APS films to CD for around $10 a roll. Maybe I'll finally get all those old films scanned!

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Finally; the last frame has been shot on my last roll of APS film, roll #866-142. I'm still not sure whether it was a good purchase or not, the camera was pricey, the APS film and developing doubly so! Fast talking by the salesmen in the shop convinced me to go with the APS rather than an only marginaly larger 35mm camera.... Twenty-one rolls of film in seven years, and I only worked out late in the process to pay extra and get the photos on CD at development time — I still haven't got around to getting the rest of the rolls scanned from the negatives, mañana mañana....

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